My research examines the significance of apology and the apologetic in late-Victorian literature, focusing on interactions with literary style, queerness, and selfhood. Drawing on ordinary language philosophy (‘OLP’), it explores how Victorian writers developed distinctive styles that both express and shield regret. While recent scholarship has examined nineteenth-century prose styles as cognitive frameworks for self-reflection, my work repositions apology as a central aesthetic practice. In doing so, it demonstrates how narratives of apology engage the formal capacities of Victorian prose to explore the affective dynamics of self-justification, reversal, and second thoughts.

I align apologetic writing with Victorian queer aestheticism, producing a literary style aimed at preserving the subjective autonomy of queer identities (Friedman, 2019). Building on recent work in literary studies on OLP, I frame apology as a distinctive form of language use – in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s terms, ‘a language game with its own particular rules’ (Moi, 2017).

My research reframes the discourse around John Henry Newman, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James as productive attempts to cultivate a vocabulary of apology that affirms the possibilities of a queer self. It explores apologetic writing across a series of key primary texts in the late-nineteenth century: Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Pater’s Gaston de Latour, Wilde’s ‘De Profundis’, and James’s ‘Prefaces’.